Abstract
The appearance of a chronic disease during childhood can have a great impact on the child’s development. The child follows a specific procedure of comprehension and adjustment, which appears to be influenced by a variety of factors and also by the specific disease characteristics, resulting in some cases in psychopathological symptoms. It is estimated that epilepsy concerns approximately 5/1000 children. What makes epilepsy a matter of special interest in comparison to other chronic conditions is that it is a heterogeneous CNS disorder that consists of clinical syndromes, characterized by different types of seizures, different underlying etiologies, frequency and severity, different treatment strategies and longitudinal outcomes. Moreover the age of onset for the great majority of the cases is usually in childhood and adolescence. The purpose of this study was a. to assess school attendance and participation in school activities of children and adolescents with epilepsy, b. to investig ...
The appearance of a chronic disease during childhood can have a great impact on the child’s development. The child follows a specific procedure of comprehension and adjustment, which appears to be influenced by a variety of factors and also by the specific disease characteristics, resulting in some cases in psychopathological symptoms. It is estimated that epilepsy concerns approximately 5/1000 children. What makes epilepsy a matter of special interest in comparison to other chronic conditions is that it is a heterogeneous CNS disorder that consists of clinical syndromes, characterized by different types of seizures, different underlying etiologies, frequency and severity, different treatment strategies and longitudinal outcomes. Moreover the age of onset for the great majority of the cases is usually in childhood and adolescence. The purpose of this study was a. to assess school attendance and participation in school activities of children and adolescents with epilepsy, b. to investigate if school is informed by the parents and if schoolmates are informed by the children themselves, c. the detection of concomitant psychopathology, d. the evaluation of stigma, overprotection, and the selfesteemated quality of life of the children and their parents and e. to determine which factors (demographic data, disease characteristics, cultural variables etc) could be correlated with all these aspects of school and family life an finally f. to compare and contrast the specific characteristics of the Christian and Muslim children with epilepsy, in the region of Thrace. This was a prospective study conducted at the University Hospital of Alexandroupolis, Greece, from November 2006 to February 2008. Children with epilepsy, aged 1-18, were recruited on a consecutive basis through the child and adolescent psychiatry, pediatric and neurology-epilepsy outpatient clinics which had been invited to participate in the study. Demographic data, information concerning epilepsy such as age of onset, duration, seizure type, seizure frequency, type of therapy, seizure severity, information concerning the school such as lost school days, participation in specific school activities, school and schoolmates’ informing were recorded. In order to assess the severity of epilepsy the ‘‘Illness Severity Index’’ (ISI) was used. Children and their parents were evaluated clinically by a semi-structured questionnaire in order to detect symptoms of psychopathology and to evaluate family’s aspects such as overprotection, stigma and self-esteemed quality of life. Statistical analysis of the data was performed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 13.0 (SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Data concerning abstenteism, participation in school activities, school and schoolmates’ informing, concomitant psychopathology, overprotection, stigma and self-esteemated quality of life were characterized as dependent variables and were correlated with the characteristics of the participants. Chi-square test was used to evaluate any potential association between the dependent variables. Multivariate stepwise logistic regression models were constructed to explore the independent effect of children’s and disease characteristics on the dependent variables. In order to compare characteristics between the different cultural groups (Christians-Muslims) Student’s t-test and Mann-Whitney test were also used. In our study the whole number of the participants had missed at least one school day due to epilepsy. The great number of lost school days has been found to be related with shorter duration of the disease, greater disease severity, lower educational level, insufficient knowledge of epilepsy, greater seizure worry and overprotection. Non-participation in specific activities was found to be related with age over 12, generalized seizures, greater seizure worry, overprotection and stigma Schools have been informed of the disease in the majority of our patients (75, 8%). Greater disease duration, lower seizure worry and better knowledge of the disease were correlated with better school informing. ...............................................
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